We are becoming 1974. Like, there's this inflation thing. Suddenly, inflation is a huge fear, and we apparently need to break out our Whip Inflation Now buttons from the Gerald Ford days.

The 'roboreceptionist' station at Carnegie Mellon.

By Keith Srakocic, AP

Do you realize who came up with W.I.N. in 1974? Alan Greenspan! And you thought you were stuck in a going-nowhere job.

In 1974, Emerson Lake & Palmer released Welcome Back My Friends to the Show that Never Ends, a tone-deaf song that was resurrected last week on one of the Friends specials.

And in 1974, The Six Million Dollar Man made its debut. Not that anybody has built a bionic person who can run in slow motion to a strange clicking sound. But a number of things have been popping up that begin to meld humans and machines, blurring distinctions between the two.

For instance, there's the important and deeply scientific experiment being conducted among the barely clothed patrons of Baja Beach Club in Barcelona. They're getting electronic credit cards implanted under their skin.

Beautiful club-goers have a problem: If you're going to wear a halter top and micro-skirt, there's not much of anywhere to put a wallet. And who wants to carry a purse when you're there to dance? Luckily, a company called VeriChip this year unveiled a solution based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology.

It's a slender glass capsule about as long as a dime is wide. Inside sits a computer chip, which stores a unique code that can identify an individual — sort of an electronic Social Security number. The capsule also holds a tiny antenna, which can radio that code to a receiver many feet away.

At the Baja Beach Club, Tuesdays are VeriChip implantation days. Stop in and a "nurse" — the club's word — uses a syringe to inject a VeriChip capsule under your skin. There don't seem to be any rules about where on the body it has to be placed. If you think this sounds like something you'd never do, then you're not the kind of person who goes to clubs wearing your bestest nose ring.

Once implanted, you become your own credit card. Need to pay for a drink? Wave your implant near a reader, and you're done. VeriChip has dreams of going global with its "human implantable ID technology" — once implanted, you could wave a body part to pay for a burger at Wendy's, a beer at a baseball game, or whatever.

There are a few kinks to be worked out, like the fact that you can't turn the chip off. Privacy groups are going to dog-pile on that one.

Another company is taking the idea of implanted radio-enabled chips to a different level. Cyberkinetics of Foxborough, Mass., calls itself "a leader in the rapidly emerging field of brain computer interfaces." The company makes BrainGate — which, despite the 1974 analogies here, is not a reference to a scandal involving someone's brain.

When implanted in a person's brain, the device can allow that person to control a computer just by thinking. It is essentially a mouse moved by brain waves. Last month, the company got federal approval to implant the chips in five paralyzed people as a test.

While the first uses of BrainGate would be to help the paralyzed, certainly such devices could eventually be implanted in healthy people. The military has visions of pilots flying planes by thought. Imagine what the porn industry — always on tech's cutting edge — could do with hands-free computing.

Another recent development suggests that people might someday be able to see in the dark. Earlier this year, Raytheon announced its Thermal-Eye 2600AS technology. This allows thermal-imaging cameras — the kind that lets people see at night or through smoke — to be small enough to be built into a firefighter's helmet. Instead of a bulky camera, thermal imaging can become almost a part of a firefighter.

The company says the technology can keep getting smaller and better. Someday perhaps it could make regular eyeglasses into night-vision glasses, or even contact lenses. All those promises my mother made about eating carrots might finally come true.

Progress in bionics isn't just about putting electronics into humans. In some cases, it's about putting humanness into electronics. Like when a group of researchers and drama students recently turned on Valerie, who sits behind a desk at Carnegie Mellon University and has the title of "roboceptionist."

Valerie looks like a 21st century scarecrow. Her head is a flat computer screen that projects her animated face and head. The screen sits on top of an industrial mobile robot that is always dressed in real clothes — the kind you'd see on your typical corporate receptionist. She is equipped with a laser scanner that can detect and track people in the room.

All this is driven by a computer programmed by the scientists at CMU's Robotics Institute and — in the most interesting twist — by the school's drama department, which was charged with giving Valerie character.

To ask her a question, you have to type on her keyboard, but she'll answer in a computer-generated voice. If you take a seat in the waiting area, you'll hear Valerie talk on the phone to her friends or her "motherboard" about all her problems, including how she hates to date vacuum cleaners.

It might seem whimsical, but Valerie pushes at the boundary between machines and humans — a step toward the Robot on Lost in Space, the most likable character on the show.

There will be a lot more news about the merging of machines and humans. University labs are doing research. Companies are being started.

Meanwhile, hopefully 2004 in no other way echoes 1974. I really don't want to have to wear Brut and tube socks again.

Kevin Maney has covered technology for USA TODAY since 1985. His column appears Wednesdays. Click here for an index of Technology columns. E-mail him at: kmaney@usatoday.com.